It's 2:41am on Thursday morning, but I haven't slept yet, ergo it is still Wednesday.

Books:

Reading Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria. It's a book to be sipped rather than gulped. I'm 80 pages in, and Jevick is less annoying but I'm still not really attached to him. But I do want to find out what happens next, and hear more about the world where he lives.

Reading Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn. I refused to read this in a fit of stubbornness when it was first published, because everyone else was reading it. I'm two chapters in, and liking it so far.

Finished Peter Haining, Wrotten English: A Celebration of Literary Misprints, Mistakes and Mishaps. A bad book, and also uncomfortably revealing about the author. If you ever read Etiquette Hell and noticed how many of the people writing in about other people's 'etiquette blunders' were actually the rude one? That. Also misogynist. Also permanently aged ten where any reference (real or imagined) to sex is concerned. Also pathologically unable to consider historical context or genre conventions or even the idea of intentional humour in writing.

There's kind of a fanboy sensibility to this book: the author was in fact a published writer, but there's something about the way he talks about love of books and "the literary fraternity", as if the former were a special quality and the latter were particularly hard to get into, that makes him sound, well, desperate. I have no plans to read his books about Doctor Who or Sherlock Holmes.

I still enjoyed the chapter on typos, editing errors and authorial errors... at least, the parts of it that he didn't cannibalise from previous collections by other people. Dude, you were not the only person to read Dennis Pryor's Funny Ha-Ha and Funny Peculiar. The chapter on student howlers had more unpublished material in it; but either they weren't as funny as the ones I already knew or maybe I've changed (grown up, even?), and somehow children getting words wrong is no longer amusing of itself. I need more. For example, "Chaucer was the father of English pottery" has been reprinted in lots of collections and all over the net, and I no longer get why it was even funny in the first place. The kid meant poetry, so what? "An antidote is a funny story you have heard before" is funny, because it's unintentionally insightful (and it helps that I had not read that one before.) Ditto the section on mistranslations.

Music:

Listened to Against Me!'s Transgender Dysphoria Blues. Loved it. Laura Jane Grace is awesome, both as a singer and as a composer/lyricist. And this is a good time for me to listen to an album about the pain of people not seeing the things in you that you want them to see, and seeing things you do not want them to, and also about claiming your identity later in life.

Also re-listening to Sleater Kinney's The Hot Rock over and over. It's not one of their albums I've obsessed over as much in the past. So it's fresh. I feel like 'Burn, Don't Freeze' would make an amazing vid, but I can't figure out what fandom or pairing. It has that sensibility. 'End of You' gets me right in the feels.

TV:

Pretty much just ZDF's logo! video podcast. ZDF is a German public service broadcaster, and logo! is their daily news show for kids, a bit like Behind The News in Australia. Or as they would put it, "Du willst wissen, was in der Welt los ist? Du willst super gut informiert sein? Dann: Hallo bei logo!" It's eight minutes or so of cheerful, informative, simple news reporting, with lots of infographics and vox pops and at least one item that isn't so much news as general education (Sunday's was about wetlands, for instance. Feuchtgebiete sind wichtig! As an adult German learner I find these segments really useful because they're usually not new information for me, just in a new language.) My German listening comprehension is not good enough for me to catch most of what I'm hearing (it took me a long time to realise that the presenter always opens not with "Hallo hallo!" but with "Hallo bei logo!", for instance) but the graphics help a lot, and I hope that I'll get better if I persist. Und super gut informiert werden.

Craft:

Started making this cross-stitch. Was not prepared for how HUGE it is. Should have been. Had to print out the PDF on 9 pages and then TAPE THEM TOGETHER. If I finish it in time and it turns out well, I'll give it to my sister, probably as a cushion rather than a framed thing.

Physical Culture:

Went for a 24 minute bike ride on Monday arvo during the cool change, when it rained. Past some wetlands, actually. Felt all sick and bright red after, but not out of breath, oddly. Am waiting to see if my hips react badly - if they don't, I'll try again in a day or so. I would very much like to get to the point where I can commute by bike to the places I go most often. The cool air was delicious.